What happens to food prices, energy supplies and jobs across the world may hinge in large part on choices made in Africa. According to Standard Bank chief economist Goolam Ballim, the continent’s young leaders carry more of that responsibility than any generation before them.
Ballim delivered that message to more than 2 200 young changemakers gathered in Cape Town last week for the first One Young World Summit held there. Addressing the main plenary at the Cape Town International Convention Centre on Friday, he argued that a more developed Africa would not only raise incomes at home but would shape the everyday wellbeing of people far beyond the continent’s borders.
“A more developed Africa would also mean the potential for greater international food security,” Ballim told the audience. “A more developed Africa means that Africa can converge its abundance of renewable resources for the benefit of the industrial world and elsewhere, but it also means that Africa can become, as a developed economy, a substantial consumer market, now 1.5-billion people and, in 2050, 2.5-billion people.”
The arithmetic is striking. Africa holds 60% of the world’s still-available arable land, a fact with direct consequences for global food security. The continent also sits between East and West, a position Ballim described as making it an ideal partner for trade and global supply chains. Its reserves of cobalt, platinum, lithium and other critical and rare earth minerals are, he said, essential to this century’s energy and advanced manufacturing build-out. “In so many respects, Africa has an enormous amount of relevance.”
Yet the gap between that potential and the lives Africans actually lead is wide, and Ballim was blunt about why. Structural barriers, he said, prevent the continent from turning what it has into prosperity. “Africa is devoid of the substructures that are necessary to monetise, to translate this potential into reality. This potential needs electricity. It needs skills. It needs technology, regulation, the rule of law, policymaking, to make this all into a true transformation that benefits society.”
The consequence is measured in the daily living standards of 18% of the world’s population. That share of humanity produces only 4% of global GDP, leaving Africans with far lower income per person than people elsewhere. Ballim pointed to the continent’s mineral wealth as a central illustration. “Africa has a dearth of critical infrastructure that is necessary to convert this potential, for example mining resources, into beneficiation, into manufacturing and into distribution. Right now, for the most part, it’s simply extracted and exported, with very little value add conducted on the continent.” For citizens, that pattern means the jobs, industries and income that could flow from Africa’s resources are created elsewhere.
Others at the summit pressed the same point about what it will take to change it. Canninah Dladla, cluster president for sub-Saharan Africa at Schneider Electric, told participants that the continent’s next generation should be leading and shaping Africa’s energy future. “We need to look at skills development and manufacturing together. If we want to localise more of what we produce and build stronger industrial capabilities across Africa, we need the right skills and the right people,” she said.
Eskom board chairperson Mteto Nyati, who spoke on the day of the local government elections, directed his appeal at young South Africans and the choices they make for their country. “Please be conscious of the choices that you make, because they are the ones that will define where you end up in life,” he said.
Meanwhile, the summit paired these economic and civic arguments with a wide-ranging line-up of speakers, among them Academy Award winner Forest Whitaker, The X-Files star Gillian Anderson, Terry Crews and Zimbabwean-American actress Danai Gurira. Panels also featured former Constitutional Court justice Albie Sachs, former public protector Thuli Madonsela, Irish musician and activist Bob Geldof, former Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos and British-Iranian Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who was detained in Iran for six years.
Further coverage of Ballim’s address and the summit can be read at https://sundayworld.co.za/news/africa-can-power-the-worlds-future-standard-bank-economist-tells-young-changemakers/
The message to the young people in the hall was that Africa’s development is not a regional concern but a shared one, and that the decisions of this generation will help determine whether the continent’s abundance finally reaches its own citizens and the wider world.